Title: Examining the potential of distributed supply chain simulation

Authors: Alexey Artamonov, Michael Pidd

Addresses: Department of Management Science, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YX, UK. ' Department of Management Science, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YX, UK.

Abstract: Supply chains are not new, but their importance has grown in recent years due to globalisation, tough competition and the increasingly networked nature of business. They have also grown in size and scale and are sometimes short lived, due to the rapid pace of contemporary business. Simulation methods have long been applied in production-inventory systems and have found increased use in Supply Chain Management (SCM). Given that supply chains are distributed entities it seems sensible to consider the application of distributed computation to their simulation with the internet as a logical inter-operation medium. Here, we analyse why, despite its potential advantages, distributed supply chain simulation is not used in industry. To do so, we consider five potential drivers which might make distributed supply simulation attractive. These are used as the basis of an analysis of the relevant literature and a discussion of the obstacles to be overcome before such real-world applications become commonplace.

Keywords: supply chain management; distributed SCM; distributed simulation; collaboration; agile systems; agile management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJASM.2006.011631

International Journal of Agile Systems and Management, 2006 Vol.1 No.4, pp.388 - 406

Published online: 06 Dec 2006 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article